Milestones

Yesterday I went to Princess Margaret Hospital for another round of indigni-titties.  Mammograms are awful and doubly so when they are repeated within weeks.

“Only a man would have invented them,” the woman ahead of me griped.  I’ve heard this before and I get the logic, but I’ve seen women be pretty vicious to each other so I wouldn’t rule out a female presence on the team of inventors.  Regardless, mammograms are bloody awful.  They are also one of the best tools for early detection which makes conscientious objection pointless.

There’s a chart in the waiting room showing the average size of a lump found by self-squishing  versus  professional fondling versus regular mammograms.  Apparently, left to our own devices we women don’t notice lumps until they are jawbreaker sized.  The mammogram is the princess of detection and catches lumps when they’re peas.

I’ve been called back in for additional screening because my bodacious tatas are comprised of dense, fibrous tissue which can camouflage as a lump.  I’ve had an on again, off again love affair with my rack since my cross-country running career was cut short in junior high.   My family’s history with Cancer makes the screening mandatory and so it’s another mark against them.  If reducing breasts to lumps of tissue strips them of all their lusty guile, so does cramming them in between cold metal and plexiglass.  Displaying cleavage is the last thing on my mind afterwards, I want to relax bra-less in a slouchy sweatshirt and let my bruised breast heal.

The technician is just a smudge taller than the height of my waist, which means the machine is at a mutually awkward level of compromise.  I bend and twist while my breast is pulled and stretched to mimic the topless women of a Nat Geo cover.  She is on tip toe as she tightens the vise of metal and plastic.  Alas, we fail to capture a decent image.  I sit for the retake, and we are both moderately more comfortable.   I wait while she takes the image to the Doctor to appraise.

Here’s the thing about waiting for a verdict – time stops and regardless of the cello taped ‘Cathy’ cartoons and cuddly cat photos, dark images infest the mind.  It is the mack-daddy of challenges to the optimist, and the ultimate test in positive thinking.  Even worse when it plays out in stages.

While I sit waiting, I remember the numerous visits over the numerous years my mother received treatment at PMH.  My walk up the covered circular driveway to the rear entrance repeats like the wedding march.  Every replay is a different angle of a different arrival.  The “Groundhog Day” torture is cut short when  a new technician arrives to escort me for a breast ultrasound.  I’m a little old-fashioned about some words, I like that ‘ultrasound’ is associated with babies and life.  I don’t want it to be synonymous with ‘cancer’ and ‘prognosis’.

During the ultrasound stage, I struggle to corral positive thoughts so I stare at the corner and think of nothing.  I focus on a singular ceiling tile as the technician rolls the device over the same lump of flesh repeatedly.  Any terrain traversed more than twice pulls my focus and I experience a psychosomatic tenderness in the patch of flesh.  This whole endeavor is torture.  And there is still more waiting.

I try thinking positive thoughts – impossible.  I try keeping the negative thoughts at bay.  I look for patterns in the ceiling tiles as I  wait for the Doctor’s assessment.  Another unbidden memory weeds its way in;  I am waiting in the hallway of a different hospital for a different doctor to make an assessment of my mother’s tests.  Thankfully, my visit ends differently.  The doctor double checks the technician’s findings and I’m cleared for another year.

It wasn’t until I got to my car that I realized how tense I had been.  At my current age, my mother was two years into her battle with cancer.  Am I playing a twisted game of catch-up with these comparisons?  I’ve caught myself measuring  against her milestones before… she was a mother at twenty-one, at twenty-six she started from scratch in a new country, and at thirty-five she was testing her will against a sixteen year old.  But these are her markers.  I do myself a disservice every time I don’t set my own markers or define my own milestones.    I know this, and I haven’t followed in her footsteps in so many ways, so why measure my health experiences against hers?  So I’m quitting while I’m ahead, starting with today’s clean bill of health.  Besides I’ll never know who had a more uncomfortable mammogram experience and it’s not really a contest I want to win.